How to Stay Motivated During Lockdown

How to stay motivated is a tricky subject on a normal day, never mind during a pandemic. In fact, lockdown and motivation have something in common – they both impact people, across the world, in different ways.

You might be in lockdown or, maybe, you are still required to leave the house for work. Either way, you’re looking for how to stay motivated during COVID-19 and this post is going to deliver.

The situation around COVID-19 seems to be developing and changing daily. Therefore, please note that this post was written on 21st March with some slight edits on 26th March.

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How to Stay Motivated During COVID-19 and Lockdown

1. Accept The Reality of Your Lockdown Situation

As mentioned before, this virus is impacting people right across the world in so many different ways. But, something we can all do is accept the reality of our situation.

Staying motivated during lockdown isn’t going to come from you complaining that you can’t go to the gym and then refusing to do anything else. It’s going to come from you going, ‘Okay, I can’t do this right now BUT I can do this’. For me, this meant accepting that I will have to put my weight-lifting on hold. Instead, I wrote down a list of everything that I COULD do, when considering my situation, to keep working towards my fitness goals.

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COVID-19 doesn’t have to get in the way of your fitness success in 2020. Check out my latest fitness post with my ‘Top 5 Tips to Set Yourself Up for Fitness Success in 2020!‘

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This, of course, doesn’t mean you can’t be sad about your situation. People value things differently. But, this is, in fact, part of the accepting process. You understand that you won’t be able to do various activities and then you look at what you can do to minimise the impact.

2. Review Your (SMART) Goals

Now might be a good time to look back at the SMART goals you set for 2020 and, now that you have accepted the reality of your situation, review them. No one knew that this virus was coming on 1st January so no one’s goals are going to reflect it. Staying motivated during COVID-19 will need to see you be resilient and adapt to your circumstances.

For example, I set myself a goal to learn a MMA sport in 2020 and I chose Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. (BJJ) Of course, rolling around on the floor with my, also sweaty, opponent is almost the exact opposite to what the guidelines are suggesting. Therefore, my progress towards that goal is going to be inhibited for many months. However, after reviewing this goal, I have decided that I am going to continue to do activities that will support me when I return back to the classes. I did some googling and found inspiration from The MMA Guru’s blog post on ‘How to Improve Your BJJ at Home.’

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Unsure what a ‘SMART’ goal is? Check out my post where I go into detail about what a SMART goal is and why you need them!

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This can be applied to various types of goals and I recommend that you take some time to take a look at yours. Also make sure to leave a comment below with your adapted SMART goal!

3. Start a Journal/Tracker/Notebook

Whether you think of yourself as a ‘journal person‘ or not, starting a one can be a great way to stay motivated during lockdown. It allows you to have a place to write your thoughts and feelings that may be increasingly strong or confusing. A journal is a space for you to record what you are doing and what you want to do. It takes everything that is in your brain, probably looking a bit like this:

and makes it so it is a bit more like this:

4. Keep Busy and Productive

Are you starting to feel like all the days are merging into one? Yeah, me too. If it wasn’t for Innocent Smoothie’s daily tweet, I’m not sure I would know what day of the week it was. This is what starts to happen when you don’t keep yourself busy.

Being busy and productive doesn’t have to mean running around like crazy all the time. Having rest is productive, as long as you are enjoying it. I was kept busy with playing over 6 hours of Animal Crossing New Horizons yesterday and I felt as productive as ever. That’s because I chose to spend my time that way. When I found myself needing a break, I cleaned and organised my office, did the washing and other chores. Yesterday was probably the best day since this all started so I can personally vouch for keeping yourself busy and in a routine.

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Stuck for things to do to keep busy, productive and feeling motivated during the COVID-19 lockdown? Check out my list below.

• Do Natacha Oceane’s new No Equipment and No Noise At-Home Workout
• Start Yoga with Adriene’s 30-day challenge, HOME.
• Start a blog! (Check out Madi Dearson’s blog for all the help and guidance!)
• Play Animal Crossing New Horizons (Not sure about Animal Crossing? Check out my Animal Crossing Journey blog post!)
• Organise and re-vamp your living space

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Feeling motivated yet?

Let me know if you are planning on implementing any of these in the comments below! If you’re looking for other places to pass the time, I’ve started streaming Animal Crossing New Horizons over on Twitch and also have number of videos on my YouTube channel.

I hope that you and your loved ones are well and healthy during these difficult times.

Until next time my friends!

-Millie 🙂

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